In the past year I've reviewed four lightweight Linuxes for OS News: VectorLinux, Puppy Linux, Lubuntu, and Damn Small Linux. This article compares the four distributions. I invite your comments in response: what are your own experiences with these and competing lightweight distros?

VectorLinux has two distinct advantages over pure Slackware: Speed and native dependency checking.

Unfortunately, you give up Slackware's extremely stable nature, and ability to customize the installation down to the individual packages. As for dependency checking, you can always use slapt-get. Personally I prefer building and maintaining my own packages via pkgbuilds or just compiling from source. I have to take the extra time to seek out dependencies, but I learned more about how GNU/Linux works using Slackware than with all the other distros combined. Edit: And of course I forgot that Slackware can still be installed on as low as a 486 with 64MB RAM! You can't beat that for old/low specs.

Still, I do prefer Arch these days for the bleeding-edge packages and excellent support community. I can still build and install from source if necessary, and my system is built piece by piece so there's no cruft. I realize Arch is far from newbie-friendly, but I would definitely say it can be considered a "lightweight" distro given how bare it can be if you want.

Though... that would be one unusual 486, with 64 MiB, me thinks. Still, it points to what the article barely addresses (worse, it seems to focus more on CPU generations for demarcation): for most "daily usage" scenarios, RAM tends to be more important than CPU power.
Lubuntu is moderately decent on a PII that I keep around (well, dual, but OTOH only 266 MHz), with a relatively large for its era 384 MiB of RAM.